Article:
Retro Reappropriations. Responses to The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman in the Czech Republic

Author(s): Pehe, Veronika
Abstract

The first post-1989 rerun of the 1970s television series Třicet případů majora Zemana (‘The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman,’ or in short ‘Major Zeman’) in the Czech Republic generated a heated controversy in the media. This article will examine why Major Zeman became such a contested topic and presents an analysis of responses to the series. The paper suggests that the rescreening consolidated a particular ‘retro’ reception of the series, which reappropriates socialist popular culture and ascribes it with an ostensibly apolitical, postmodern, ironic sensibility. The paper will consider how such a response can be reconciled with more explicitly political approaches to the series, arguing that retro has a political agenda of its own.


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Pehe, Veronika: Retro Reappropriations. Responses to The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman in the Czech Republic. In: VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture, Jg. 3 (2014-06-24), Nr. 5, S. 100-107. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14098.
@ARTICLE{Pehe2014-06-24,
 author = {Pehe, Veronika},
 title = {Retro Reappropriations. Responses to The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman in the Czech Republic},
 year = 2014-06-24,
 doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14098}",
 volume = 3,
 address = {Hilversum},
 journal = {VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture},
 number = 5,
 pages = {100--107},
}
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